Adoption 101

Infertility affects an overwhelming number of people. According to resolve.org, 1 in 8 couples (or 12% of married women) have trouble getting pregnant or sustaining a pregnancy. (2006-2010 National Survey of Family Growth, CDC) When dealing with infertility, it seems like you are the only one, but it also seems like the numbers should be considerably higher.

One option to assemble the family you’ve dreamt about is through adoption. Since my brothers and I were adopted, it wasn’t as difficult a decision as it was for my husband. Our recommendation is that both partners have to be on the same page before proceeding in whatever direction you choose and don’t pressure each other into a decision. My husband took a year to decide he was ready to discuss this option further. If one person is not ready, the whole process is going to be unnecessarily harder.

So many pieces go into an adoption. What agency to use for the adoption and/or the home study, a lot of paperwork, definitely the emotions involved with every difficult decision, and so much more. These are things we’ve learned with our first adoption and are discovering with this recent opportunity.

Not all adoption agencies are the same so pick the one that is right one for your family. Some promote the adoptive parents and others the prospective birth mom/parents with agencies in one particular state, nationally, and internationally. Agencies include an average wait time and in our experience the shorter wait times are typically met if you are open to everything, like the mom currently taking drugs or alcohol, etc. Adoptions are closed, semi-open, and open so make sure you and your partner are comfortable with all the decisions you choose.

My husband and I were pretty stressed over the home study and yes, there is a lot of paperwork. You will need to take a class which was actually very good even though we weren’t too hyped to go. We didn’t inform many people we were embarking on this process until after I asked our case worker if we were going to pass the home study. If we weren’t going to make the cut, we didn’t want a lot of people to know we weren’t “qualified” to be parents. Our social worker laughed.

There are many hard decisions, a lot of time, and loads of paperwork that goes into the process, but in the end it is definitely worth it. We started our journey in 2015, and we got Q in December 2017. During that time it seemed like forever and my husband and I getting older each day. Little Q just wasn’t ready yet and I believe we were all meant for each other. Hopefully, he’ll have a little brother or sister in a few months to play with, likely fight with, and grow older with. Our happy little family dreams.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, but feel free to contact me with any questions you might have and I’ll help in any way I can.

I am going to share our experiences, ideas, inspirations, accomplishments, and even our flops and fiascoes in our journey to make this little part of the world a better place. Our plan is to grow to be better people.